Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

parties––being then essentially and morally no marriage––and it
seemed a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy, told for its own
sake as a presentation of particulars containing a good deal that was
universal, and not without a hope that certain cathartic, Aristotelian
qualities might be found therein.
The di
fficulties down to twenty or thirty years back of acquiring
knowledge in letters without pecuniary means were used in the same
way; though I was informed that some readers thought these epi-
sodes an attack on venerable institutions, and that when Ruskin
College* was subsequently founded it should have been called the
College of Jude the Obscure.
Artistic e
ffort always pays heavily for finding its tragedies in the
forced adaptation of human instincts to rusty and irksome moulds
that do not 
fit them. To do Bludyer and the conflagratory bishop
justice, what they meant seems to have been only this: ‘We Britons
hate ideas, and we are going to live up to that privilege of our native
country. Your picture may not show the untrue, or the uncommon,
or even be contrary to the canons of art; but it is not the view of life
that we who thrive on conventions can permit to be painted.’
xlv
Preface

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But what did it matter. As for the matrimonial scenes, in spite of
their ‘touching the spot,’ and the screaming of a poor lady in Black-
wood
that there was an unholy anti-marriage league afoot, the famous
contract––sacrament I mean––is doing fairly well still, and people
marry and give in what may or may not be true marriage as light-
heartedly as ever. The author has even been reproached by some
earnest correspondents that he has left the question where he found
it, and has not pointed the way to a much-needed reform.
After the issue of Jude the Obscure as a serial story in Germany, an
experienced reviewer of that country informed the writer that Sue
Bridehead, the heroine, was the 
first delineation in fiction of the
woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year––
the woman of the feminist movement––the slight, pale ‘bachelor’
girl––the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that mod-
ern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not
recognize the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a
profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are
licensed to be loved on the premises. The regret of this critic was
that the portrait of the newcomer had been left to be drawn by a
man, and was not done by one of her own sex, who would never have
allowed her to break down at the end.
Whether this assurance is borne out by dates I cannot say. Nor am
I able, across the gap of years since the production of the novel, to
exercise more criticism upon it of a general kind than extends to a
few verbal corrections, whatever, good or bad, it may contain. And
no doubt there can be more in a book than the author consciously
puts there, which will help either to its pro
fit or to its disadvantage as
the case may be.
T. H.
April
.
xlvi
Jude the Obscure

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CONTENTS